Good morning, everyone. My name is Ashley Owens, and I cover global brands and e-commerce for KeyBanc. I'm very pleased to introduce Oxford Industries this morning. We think they've been successful at kind of achieving an emotional connection with their customers due to their strong portfolio of lifestyle brands, which is inclusive of Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, Southern Tide, and then the recently acquired Johnny Was. With me today, I have the Chairman, CEO, and President, Tom Chubb. Now I'll turn it over to Tom for an overview of the company.
Okay. Thank you, Ashley, and thanks for that great introduction. Ashley hit upon all the key things: emotional connection to the customer, powerful lifestyle brands. Very well done, Ashley. Thank you for that. And thanks to all of you for being here this morning. If there are any Michigan fans in the room, congratulations on the game last night. I know that was very exciting. As Ashley said, my name is Tom Chubb, and delighted to be here today representing Oxford Industries. That's our cautionary statement. I'm not gonna try to read that. We posted it on an 8-K yesterday. You can read it. This slide is actually super important. It's sort of high-level, fundamental kinds of stuff, but this is really the framework that we use to operate our business and guide our decision-making.
It starts with our objective, and we're obviously a publicly traded company. As a public company, we wanna make absolutely certain that we never lose sight of the fact that our job, what we get paid to do, is to maximize long-term shareholder value. We talk about that all the time internally, internally. We use that as the North Star for our decision-making process, including directing what our strategy is, and our strategy is to drive excellence across a portfolio of lifestyle brands that create sustained, profitable growth. Obviously, to drive shareholder value, you've got to create sustained, profitable growth, and the method by which we've chosen to go about doing that is to have a portfolio of lifestyle brands and try to run them as well as we possibly can.
Our purpose is to evoke happiness, and by that, what we mean is the job of each of our brands is to evoke happiness in their customers. These are lifestyle brands. They're selling discretionary items. In order to get people to buy them, we need to create desire among the consumers, and the way that we create that desire is by evoking happiness through our brands, our products, our store experiences, our bars and restaurants, our e-commerce experience. And then finally, our focus, and this is another one of these things that's very obvious, but we never wanna lose sight of it, is to generate cash as much as we can, then reinvest that cash in organic growth opportunities, acquisition opportunities, and the return of capital to our shareholders. So this slide's just got some background stuff on Oxford to help frame things in for you.
Been around since 1942, went public in 1960, listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1964. Paid a dividend every quarter since we went public. On the right, you see the breakdown of the revenue by operating, group. Our, our brands, Tommy Bahama, Lilly, Johnny Was, and then the Emerging Brands group. And then at the bottom, you have the breakdown by channel, and you see that we've got a very, what I would call, healthy, modern, balanced, distribution approach. So we've got a good slug of company-owned retail, restaurants and bars, and a very healthy e-commerce business, and then about 20% wholesale. So we're very much direct-to-consumer led, but wholesale is still a very important and valuable part of the business. Our biggest brand is Tommy Bahama.
You can see on this slide that it's 57% of the total company at this point. This is our island lifestyle brand. It is truly a lifestyle brand. It's aspirational, it's inspirational, it creates a world and a dream that people embrace and want to be part of. Tommy Bahama has also been a big part of the success we've had over the last 4 or 5 years because the improvement in the profitability of Tommy Bahama has been pretty dramatic during that time period. So here we've laid out on the left column, the trailing twelve months through the end of the third quarter of this fiscal year compared to fiscal 2019. You can see sales are up about 31%, but most impressively, I think, gross margin is up 400 basis points from 61% to 65%.
Operating margin has increased from 8%-18%. Our customer account has increased from about 1.2 million-1.6 million. And very, very importantly to Tommy Bahama and our strategy and what we're trying to accomplish, our women's business has grown from being 31%-36% of our direct business. Now, the men's business has been growing through this whole period, but obviously, women's has been growing even faster. So the question we get all the time over the last year or so, and I think it's a fair question, is: How did this happen? How did this dramatic improvement happen, and is it sustainable? And so let me tell you why I think it's very sustainable.
It starts with the sales, and the way that we were able to drive so much of that was really through comp store sales growth. During that period, we grew our sales per square foot from $615-$790. When you get that type of sales growth in an existing retail base, it creates an opportunity for tremendous operating leverage, which we took advantage of. The second thing I would tell you, what enabled us to do this, is really much better creative communication, so the messaging that we've been giving to the consumer about what our brand is and what it stands for. You roll back four or five years ago, we were starting to feel more like we were just selling product.
We flipped that back to what made us great in the first place, which is really about selling the dream. The second thing that we did, and this ties into the women's as well, is that we realized that the women's business that we have, fundamentally, all of that is purchased by women. But in addition to that, most of the men's product is actually purchased by women also. So if we were gonna be successful in building a women's business, and we were gonna enhance our men's business, we really needed to be, as we say, talking to her and creating messages and imagery that really resonate with her. We did that in a very aspirational and inspirational way, and it's worked for us. Then there are also some more operational things.
We increased our initial margins substantially, and when you start from a higher place, it's a lot easier to finish at a higher place, and we've done that. And then we have things like our order management system, which we implemented in 2020, and allow us to match demand anywhere it's coming from with inventory, wherever it's located. That allows us to be much more efficient with our inventory, sell through at a higher rate, satisfy more demand, and ultimately have higher margins. Our next brand is Lilly Pulitzer. It's our second biggest brand. It's a little bit over a fifth of the business. It's a very distinctive brand. Many of you are probably familiar with it, but there's no mistaking Lilly Pulitzer when you know it. You see it, you'll know immediately that it's Lilly Pulitzer.
It's a great brand that's very profitable, got very, very loyal customers, and again, very distinctive handwriting. This year marks the 65th anniversary of Lilly Pulitzer. We've owned it since 2010, but it's actually been around since 1959. So this is a brand that's, that's certainly got staying power, and we love the brand and what it is and the heritage of the brand, and we're gonna respect that and embrace that, but bring that forward with some refreshments to the brand logo, the iconography, the packaging, the store design. We're already infusing some of that in the product line, and then the communications will go along with that. So stay tuned, for more on that as 2024 progresses. Then Johnny Was is the newest addition to our portfolio. It's a little less than 15% of the business.
It's a California bohemian chic brand. We love the business. Very delighted to have the management team as part of our company. It's a little bit higher price point than our other brands. It really lives in the affordable luxury zone, and it gives us diversification from a fashion point of view standpoint, a seasonality standpoint, and a geographical standpoint, being much more West Coast-oriented. It's got great store economics, and we've got a great pipeline of retail stores in the works there. And then last is our Emerging Brands Group, which covers our three smaller brands: Southern Tide, The Beaufort Bonnet Company, and Duck Head. This is a rapidly growing and profitable, albeit still only a little less than 10% of the business.... part of our business, so rapidly growing, profitable, and a great platform to onboard smaller brands and really let them develop.
This gives you a little bit of a view of what's happened at Oxford over the last 20 years. 20 years ago, we were entirely a private label manufacturer. We've always had a portfolio approach, but everything in the portfolio at that time was private label. We made a strategic decision that we needed to exit that and focus on lifestyle brands. We did it. It was a lot of hard work, a lot of all-nighters. Took a long time, but we got there, and none of the businesses we had in 2003 are still part of the company, and all of the businesses we have today, we bought since 2003. So the question is: What did that do for you? Well, you can see our gross margin went from 21% to 63%.
Our operating income increased sixfold, I think that is, and our earning—our stock price, excuse me, increased eightfold. So very happy with where we are. We think we're very well-positioned for the current and future market that we participate in. This is important. We look at customers as being the building blocks of our business because they are. And this is really the way that... This is the first view that we take, is how many active customers do we have? How many are we adding to that, and how much do they spend with us each year? So the way to think about is every time we add a customer, that's another $380. This is the pipeline of future store openings. One of the most important ways we bring new customers in is through our bricks-and-mortar retail store.
We took a little bit of a pause due to the pandemic, but we got back, and we've opened a lot of stores in fiscal 2023, through the third quarter, 17, and have nine additional that we think we'll have open by the end of this month. And then we've got 20 or so in the pipeline for next year. And of course, we're continuing to look for more in May. That number may move up a little bit. And then another great way that we bring customers in and keep them is through fulfilling demand. We're a little bit short on fulfillment capacity in the southeastern part of the United States. Not a little bit short.
We're well short of what we would like to have in the southeastern United States to support the very robust business we have in this part of the country, especially in Florida, where we sit today. And so we've got a big DC project that we're just really in the early phases of, but that will be running over the next 18 months. Then this is the revenue and EPS sort of trend over 10 years. It's not quite as smooth a curve as, you know, you'd ideally like to see, but this is, you know, it's the fashion business. There are gonna be little bumps, and then we have that big bump of the pandemic, but generally, it's up and to the right, which, of course, is what we want to see. And then there's the capital allocation.
I won't drag you through this, but this just shows us generating cash, then reinvesting that cash in the business, in acquisitions, and returning capital to shareholders, all while maintaining a rock-solid balance sheet. Then we gave this update. Of course, this time of year, people always wanna know: How are things going? How was holiday? What we said here is that performance during holiday did what we needed it to do in order for us to hit our previous guidance for the fourth quarter of this year. Important to note that January is an important full-price month for us. So we still have a little work to do, but we feel good about our ability to do it. And then we updated on some store openings, in the, in the rest of the notes there. And with that, we'll go back to Ashley and the Q&A.
Great, thanks so much. So, you know, you focused a lot on Tommy Bahama and kind of the retail storefront, but maybe another piece of that is this hospitality business that you guys have been in for almost 30 years. You recently just opened a resort in Coachella Valley, California. You've been opening a slew of Marlin Bars as of recent. Maybe just discuss the strategy there and why it's so important to the health of the Tommy brand and kind of how you're thinking about expansion plans as you move forward.
Yes, great question, Ashley. Thank you. So the hospitality business, and that includes our food and beverage business, which we own and operate ourselves, and then the new resort that we just opened in Indian Wells, California, that's operated by a partner. We're the licensor of that. But if you think about what we're trying to do here, we have a lifestyle brand, and when you have a brand, you're just creating things or products. When you have a lifestyle brand, what you're really trying to do is create a whole world or even a universe. And when that resonates with people, that world resonates with people, they wanna move into that world and be a part of that.... And when they do that, they tend to stay for a very, very long time and are willing to buy a wide range of products for you.
So that's what we've done in Tommy Bahama. I would say, the brand's done it for 30 years. We've owned them for 20 years now. I think we've done a good job of nurturing that, truly building a lifestyle brand or a world that people can embrace and move into and buy all the products and enjoy all the services, and the hotel is the latest extension of that. You can literally move in, and spend the night or stay as long as you want, really. And then the restaurants are a version of that, that we've had for a long, long time because as our CEO in Tommy Bahama says, "You get somebody to come in the retail store, you know, maybe you've got 'em for 20, 25 minutes, something like that.
You get them to come into the restaurant and bar, and you've got them for two hours, and they really immerse themselves in the brand." So the big-picture reason we do hospitality is really to help build out the world. But then in terms of financial metrics, on its own, it's a profitable business. But as you know, Ashley, it also drives tremendous success in the retail stores, that are affiliated with those locations. So every one of our restaurant bar locations has a retail store along there. They're much more productive than our regular stores. They do a much higher percentage of their business in women's, which we think is a plus, and those people that come into us through those stores end up being very, very loyal customers that we see again through e-commerce.
Maybe, if they've been at, say, the Naples restaurant, they go back to Chicago, we'll see 'em in one of our Chicago area stores. That's really what we're trying to do there.
Great! That's a great overview. Just to focus on Tommy a little bit more, you know, you talked about the women's business a little bit and how that's been kind of a strong highlight within the brand. Can you just talk a little bit more about your shift in strategy there, maybe any learnings you could use to support growth of your other brands?
Yeah, another great question. So what I would say that we've learned from our ability to build the women's business is really the power of a lifestyle brand. So as I talked about a minute ago, when you successfully create that world, that lifestyle world, that resonates with people, and they wanna embrace it and be part of it and move into it, it gives you permission to extend the product boundaries of what you offer to the customer. So, in Tommy Bahama, we've got an incredible team of people that have been so dedicated to building that true lifestyle brand and building that world of Tommy Bahama, as you will, that when they shifted their focus to really developing that women's business, they had the permission from the customer to go there, and it's worked.
I think that's the biggest learning to me, Ashley, is the power that building a real lifestyle brand by thinking about the dream first, not the specific products, but what's the big-picture dream that we're trying to create, and really focusing on that, and then building the products that go with it. The second thing I would say is the value of a team that completely buys into that idea of building a lifestyle brand and making sure that everything that we do is right for the brand and is on brand.
Great. So I know we're coming close to wrapping up here on time, so just wanted to ask as we wrap up here, you know, what excites you most about the future of Oxford?
I think the most exciting thing about the future of Oxford is the strategy that we have, that I outlined before. I think it's the right strategy. We have been developing it over a long time. I think we're now in an outstanding position to continue to run that. We'll adjust that as needed along the way. Over the last 20 years, we've made little tweaks to the strategy, and we'll continue to do so. The next thing, and this is the most important of all, is the team of people that we've got in place to execute that strategy. I think most of the people in this room know that without the right people, you cannot do whatever it is you're trying to accomplish, and we've got those people.
And then the last thing, and this is more specific to 2024 and right now, is the lineup of projects that we've got this year. So we've got 5... We're gonna open a Marlin Bar later this month, and then have 5 more over the balance of the year, and that's very exciting. Then we've got those 20 net new retail stores, and then we've got the DC, which in some ways is kind of a behind-the-scenes thing that's not so glamorous. But what that's gonna do for us and our ability to get product where it needs to be faster, which'll drive, more sales, higher inventory turns, higher margins, we're very excited about all that.
Well, great. You know, I'm excited to see what the future holds for you as well.